As seen in the screenshot, there's a lot of wasted space in landscape mode on my tablet. I don't see this issue in the feed. I've only noticed it when viewing it editing posts and comments.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Liftoff!
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This may surprise you, but I think fitting the UI to the width of the screen is a more comfortable reading experience than squishing it into some arbitrary percentage that I don't have control over. Give users the choice to decide what they prefer is all I want.
If you want wide text cool, but There are studies about how our eyes work when scanning text and that anything beyond 80 characters per line is more challenging. There is a reason type isn't set that way, and why we don't have books that are two feet wide. This isn't just some artbitrary stuff that designers make up.
I'm convinced half the tech world ignores all the science and research and thinks designers make up everything.
It's easy to take one requirement and design for that, so everyone thinks they are a designer. It's like people thinking they can juggle plates like a circus act because they have been eating off plates their whole lives.
Well, literally every other application on my tablet utilizes the available space. There could be a collapsible feed view on the left and a collapsible community sidebar view on the right. When I hit reply button, it could open up the comment editor on either side. Or maybe I could pin the post on the left and scroll the comments on the right (or vice-versa). The arbitrary width limit is also forcing images to be smaller than they need to be. And clicking on the images.will just show them in the size they already could have been shown online if the view was fitted to the screen width.
At the end of the day, I paid for a device with a large screen because it can comfortably display more content. The device and the OS support landscape orientation, and technically so does Liftoff. But if the developer feels strongly that users should stick to portrait mode, then they can simply disable landscape mode altogether so it doesn't redraw itself when I physically rotate the device from one to the other. Otherwise, they should have options to use the extra screen width in landscape mode.